The Advocates on WJUP

Presidential Criticism, Open Season & The Current Field of Contenders with Nick Taylor- 1-31-16

My guest is author Nick Taylor and our subject is, “Presidential Criticism, Open Season and the Current Field of Contenders!” -  1-31-16

Nick Taylor has written ten books of non-fiction, both solely and in collaboration, on a wide variety of subjects.  His history of the Works Progress Administration, American-Made - The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work, was published in 2008 to wide acclaim.

Taylor’s other subjects include tournament bass fishing, the Mafia, and life in a small church. His memoir, A Necessary End recounts a baby boomer’s growing concern and care for his parents in their final years.  His story of an intrepid Israeli’s journey into the German neo-Nazi underground, In Hitler’s Shadow, written with Yaron Svoray, was adapted as the HBO feature movie, The Infiltrator, starring Oliver Platt.  His account of a Mafia family in the government’s Witness Protection Program, Sins of the Father, is currently under a motion picture option.  Laser, published in 2009, tells the story of the laser’s true inventor and his thirty-year fight to win the patents that would make him rich.  And he worked with astronaut and Senator John Glenn on the bestselling, John Glenn: A Memoir.

His pro bono work includes four years as the former president of the Authors Guild, the oldest and largest organization of published writers in the United States, which advocates for authors’ rights. He is now president of the Author’s Guild Foundation.  He is a native of western North Carolina who today lives in Greenwich Village with his wife Barbara Nevins Taylor, who teaches broadcast news writing at Brooklyn College and is the founder of the consumer financial advice website ConsumerMojo.com.  

 Mr. Taylor has appeared on The Advocates on July, 16, 2008, December 17, 2008, April 13, 2011, and Jan 30, 2013.

 

 

"The Importance of American Manufacturing Competiticeness" with Gordon Zuckerman, 1-24-16

My guest is author Gordon Zuckerman, who is the author of the acclaimed historical fiction series, The Sentinels.  We will be discussing his views on the American economic landscape and the criticality of competitiveness.   

From June 1963, following the author’s graduation from the Harvard Business School, until April 2005,  when he sold his Resort Hotel company, Mr. Zuckerman enjoyed the privilege of working for forty-two years as an entrepreneurial problem solver during what many people regard as the Golden Age of American Commerce. Throughout this period he was responsible for creating cattle feeding companies, student housing companies, a national joint-venture real estate investment company, and a resort hotel company.

Through-out his career he would witness, hear, or become aware of major events that appeared to have a significant influence over people’s lives, some positive and some not so beneficial. Provided with the free time of retirement, Mr. Zuckerman has concentrated his attention on researching contemporary events, the consequences of which, have been instrumental on peoples’ lives.  He has concluded, while the history of free enterprise is clearly dominated by the many stories of high-minded success where the resources made available were organized to “Push Back the Desert”, and situations where the resources were misdirected and manipulated in the pursuit of self-serving agendas, frequently achieved at the public’s expense.

Becoming more familiar with the story behind the story, Zuckerman believes the democratic free enterprise system represents the goose that lays the ‘golden eggs’ and needs to be protected from those who would abuse the privilege. He has used his writing easel to illustrate what can happen when a small fictional group, “The Six Sentinels” decide to help make-happen the constructive efforts and oppose those of questionable intentions.

To create the plot for each of his books, the author has chosen to connect the dots of history. Any book describing the support or opposition to self-serving agendas must necessarily be a story about people. The stories are told through the evolving lives of fictional, high-minded, high-energy, creative problem solvers. The intrigue in their lives has been added to generate added interest for the reader who is interested in learning more about the cause and effects of some of the important events of our times.

 

 

"Why Many Students Hate History, Presidents as Students, Political Rhetoric: Past and Present" with Professor James Longo

Professor James M. Longo of Washington and Jefferson College, is the author of From Classroom to White House: Presidents and First Ladies as Students and Teachers, which compares and contrasts the educational opportunities and experiences of male and female residents of the White House.

Professor Jim Longo grew up and attended schools in St. Louis, Missouri. He was an award winning public school teacher for over a decade where he taught students from early elementary school through high school. He has a degree in History from the University of Missouri in St. Louis and has his doctorate in Teaching, Curriculum, and Learning from Harvard University. It was while he was at Harvard that he began having lunch with the former U.S. Commissioner of Education in the Kennedy-Johnson Administration. Over lunch he heard many stories about how being a teacher influenced Lyndon Johnson as a president and the role of Lady Bird Johnson in creating and supporting the Head Start program. Those stories inspired him to research other stories of presidents and first ladies as teachers. He discovered that half the presidents and first ladies have taught. But he also found stories about them as students that were funny, scary, sad, and inspiring. He realized that if by some magic time machine all the presidents and first ladies could return as children and be placed in a classroom together – they would be a teacher’s worse nightmare. These stories form the basis for his new book – FROM CLASSROOM TO WHITE HOUSE: Presidents and First Ladies as Students and Teachers.

He has shared these stories as lectures and in classrooms throughout the United States and in Austria, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, England, and the Czech Republic. Professor Longo did over ten years of research for this book, visiting many of the schools where American presidents and first ladies were students and teachers, read their report cards, spoke with teachers and classmates, and even sat in many times on the Sunday school class taught by President Jimmy Carter.

Dr. Longo is currently Chair of the Education Department of Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania which sits on land once owned by Martha Washington. Over the years he has met several presidents and first ladies and taught and worked with a number of children whose ancestors once lived in the White House. He is the recipient of teaching and community service awards from the National Association for Children and Adults with Learning Disabilities, the American Youth Foundation, and other organizations and non-profits and has been recognized as Educator of the Year by the Junior Achievement Corporation of Pittsburgh.

His primary areas of research, writing, and teaching include gender equity in the classroom, the theory of multiple intelligences, creating the inclusive classroom, the role of women in history, and the teaching and learning experiences of presidents and first ladies as students and teachers.Dr. Longo has been appointed as a Fulbright scholar to the University of Klagenfurt Distinguished Chair in Gender Studies Lectureship at Klagenfurt University, Austria for 2011.

He has written seven books including three collections of ghost stories, articles and books on the New England Shakers, and a biography of Isabel Orleans Bragança: The Brazilian Princess Who Freed the Slaves. His story of Latin America's most famous female abolitionist was told in the context of the historic role royal women played in the rise and fall of Brazilian slavery. It was nominated for the Frederick Douglas Book Prize for the "most outstanding nonfiction book published in English on the subject of slavery and abolition." His latest book, From Classroom to White House: Presidents and First Ladies as Students and Teachers, compares and contrasts the educational opportunities and experiences of male and female residents of

Dr. Longo's research and teaching have taken him to Austria, Brazil, Costa Rica, Portugal, England, Scotland, Wales, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Canada. Under his leadership the W&J Education Department has developed school partnerships with El Centro de Educatión Creativa in Monteverde, Costa Rica, the University of Wales, Newport, St. Mary's University, England, and Aberdeen University, Scotland. Jim believes all he ever needed to know he learned at summer camp. When not teaching or writing, he would rather be in a canoe than any other place on earth.

 

 

The Advocates with Hedrick Smith, "Who Stole the American Dream, an Update" 1-10-16

My guest is Pulitzer Prize winning long-time correspondent for the New York Times, Hedrick Smith, author of Who Stole the American Dream? We will discuss his views on what happened to America, Wall Street, the Middle Class and our future.Hedrick Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter and editor and Emmy Award-winning producer/correspondent, is one of America's most distinguished journalists. He has covered Washington and world capitals for The New York Times, authored several best-selling books and created 20 award-winning PBS prime time specials and miniseries on Washington's power game, Soviet perestroika, the global economy, education reform, health care, teen violence, terrorism and Wall Street.

After September 11th, Mr. Smith went Inside the Terror Network with PBS Frontline to show how Al Qaeda's conspirators organized their attack and how the U.S. missed chances to catch them. He has since led Frontline investigative reports, Bigger Than Enron, The Wall Street Fix, Tax Me If You Can, Is Wal-Mart Good for America? and Can You Afford to Retire? These programs probed accounting scandals, conflicts on Wall Street, global trade, corporate fraud, the rising crisis in retirement funding, and their implications for American investors, workers and retirees. The Wall Street Fix won a prestigious Emmy for documentaries on business.

For 26 years, Mr. Smith served as a correspondent for The New York Times in Washington, Moscow, Cairo, Saigon, Paris and the American South. In 1971, as chief diplomatic correspondent, he was a member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that produced the Pentagon Papers series. In 1974, he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting from Russia and Eastern Europe. From 1976-1988, he was The New York Times Washington bureau chief and chief correspondent.

Hedrick Smith has published several national best-selling books, including The Russians (1976), The Power Game: How Washington Works (1988), The New Russians (1990) and Rethinking America (1995). He has co-authored several other books. His newspaper career began with The Greenville (S.C.) News. After completing his B.A. at Williams College and doing graduate work at Oxford University, he worked for Universal Press International in Memphis, Nashville and Atlanta, 1959-62, and for The New York Times, 1962-88. He was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in 1969-7

Smith began creating documentaries for PBS in 1989 with an adaptation from his best-selling book, The Power Game. His second documentary series, Inside Gorbachev's USSR, broadcast on PBS in 1990, built on his experience as Moscow Bureau Chief for The New York Times in the 1970s, on his best selling book, The Russians, and on his subsequent coverage of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika. Inside Gorbachev's USSR won the duPont-Columbia grand prize in 1991 for the most outstanding public affairs production on U.S. television.

Mr. Smith's PBS miniseries, the two-hour prime time special, Making Schools Work, which broadcast in 2005, showed dramatic and surprising improvements in educational achievement among students from poor neighborhoods in previously low-performing schools. In two previous series, Challenge to America in 1994 and Surviving the Bottom Line in 1998, Hedrick Smith Productions compared American public schools and students with those in Germany, Japan and China, to see which nations and systems are gaining competitive advantage in the 21st century. By identifying school models and strategies that are generating large-scale success - lifting the performance of roughly two million low income and minority students - offers examples that have enormous significance for American public education across the country.

In his documentaries, Mr. Smith's work ranges widely with enduring impact and broad reach. His programs on Washington politics were not only popular but are now widely used in college and university courses. Before the 2000 election, PBS devoted an entire prime time evening to his pre-election special on U.S. health care, Critical Condition with Hedrick Smith, which was nominated for an Emmy. He has produced two four-hour miniseries on the impact of the global economy on the U.S. middle class, Challenge to America and Surviving the Bottom Line. For Black History month, he gave PBS viewers Duke Ellington's Washington. A year later, he created Rediscovering Dave Brubeck, an intimate portrait of the legendary jazz pianist.

In September 1999, after deadly violence at several U.S. public schools, Smith produced a three-hour prime time special, Seeking Solutions, that broke new ground by showing effective grass roots responses in six American communities to teen violence, gangs, street crime and hate crime. The program won the 1999 public service award for television from Sigma Delta Chi, the national journalism society.

Almost all of Hedrick Smith's productions have won awards from film festivals and competitions. The Power Game (1989), won the international RIAS prize as well as a CINE Golden Eagle, and his inner city documentary, Across the River (1995), about community building in crime-plagued neighborhoods of Washington, won the prestigious Sidney Hillman Award, among others. Five other documentaries have won CINE Golden Eagle Awards and others have brought home honors from film festivals. PBS viewers saw Mr. Smith for 25 years as a principal panelist on Washington Week in Review and have also seen him as a special correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Mr. Smith has received six honorary doctorate degrees and has spoken at several college commencements. He was born July 9, 1933 in Kilmacolm, He was educated at The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Wallingford, Connecticut and at Williams College, and did graduate work at Oxford University. You can read more about Hedrick Smith at his website: http://reclaimtheamericandream.org/ Or listen to at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRbCRuPkddg

Next week The Advocates will discuss “Have American students forgotten history?” with Professor James Longo.

The Advocates with Dr. Chris Breiseth - "Frances Perkins, Her Vision of the New Deal, and the Challenge from the Right!" 1-3-16

My guest is Dr. Chris Breiseth, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Frances Perkins Center.

Christopher N. Breiseth is the immediate past president and CEO of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, which is located at the FDR Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York. He served in that position from 2001 to 2008. He was president of Deep Springs College in California from 1980 to 1983 and of Wilkes University from 1984 to 2001. He earned his B.A. in history at UCLA, a Masters of Literature in Modern British History from Oxford and a Ph.D. in European History from Cornell. While at Cornell, he lived at the Telluride House, where Frances Perkins was a guest, for the last five years of her life, while she was teaching at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Together, Breiseth and Miss Perkins organized two seminars for house members, one with Henry A. Wallace, the other with James Farley. Following Miss Perkins's death in 1965, Breiseth wrote an article, "The Frances Perkins I Knew," which provides some of the material on Frances Perkins's life at Telluride House for Kirstin Downey's book, "The Woman Behind the New Deal." The article is available on line. He also served for a year and a half in 1967 and 1968 as Chief of Policy Guidance for the Community Action Program which was part of the Office of Economic Opportunity, President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. The Frances Perkins Center is devoted to Secretary Perkin’s vision of social justice, preserving economic security and her legacy for future generations.

Next week I will be hosting, Pulitzer Prize winner, journalist Hedrick Smith and we will be re-visiting his book “Who Stole the American Dream,” and his thoughts on today’s economy and the political climate of 2016.

The Advocates with Professor Michael Curtis- "The Middle East, ISIS and the Future"

My guest is Professor Michael Curtis, author of Should Israel Exist?

Michael Curtis is the Distinguished Professor Emeritus of political science at Rutgers University. He is highly regarded as an expert in several fields--political theory, comparative government, European politics and the Middle East and is the author of Orientalism and Islam, European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India, and how historical perspectives give us insights into today’s problems in that vital area. Professor Curtis appeared on The Advocates on March 27, 2011, and January 25, 2012. Since our last interview, Professor Curtis was appointed by the President of France, in November of 2014, a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor!

Among his approximately 30 books a few should be singled out as being particularly important and influential. His most recent book Verdict on Vichy, 2004 examined the degree to which the French legal and administrative system, the Church, and individuals in different walks of life collaborated with the Nazis who occupied France between 1940 and 1944. He reviewed the careers of those persons indicted for crimes against humanity, and the complex aryanisation process which requisitioned Jewish goods and property. His analysis of the rise of anti-democratic and anti-Semitic ideology in France after the Dreyfus affair in a book called, Three Against the Third Republic is considered the definitive study of this era in early 20th century French political history.

Other books include Totalitarianism, a study of the 20th century European totalitarian regimes, and Anti-Semitism in the Contemporary World. The latter book is a collection based on the papers delivered at a groundbreaking conference Professor Curtis organized in the 1980s. In addition, Professor Curtis is considered an expert on the Middle East. His many books on this area of the world cover a number of subjects. He was one of the first to discuss the tangled web of the interconnections between religion and politics in the Muslim world in Religion and Politics in the Middle East. Other significant books on the Middle East include Israel: Social Structure and Change and Israel in the Third World. Professor Curtis is the author, as well, of textbooks that cover political theory, The Great Political Theories, a book first published forty years ago is still in print today.Professor Curtis has been an activist as well as a scholar. For many years, he was the president of American Professors for Peace in the Middle East and editor of the Middle East Review. As such he was often called upon by the press and television for comments as problems arose in the Middle East conflict over the last decades. He has traveled widely, in all the Western European countries including a year in Paris, as well as visits to Russia, Croatia, Israel, Korea, Japan, and Australia. Professor Curtis was born in London in 1923 and educated at the London School of Economics, where he got a degree with first class honors. He came to the United States and obtained a doctorate at Cornell University in political science. In addition to his years at Rutgers, he has taught at Cornell University, Yale University, Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Massachusetts, University of Bologna, and Connecticut College, and given lectures at hundreds of institutions. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey, is married, and has two sons and six grandchildren.

The Advocates with Ben Frank, "Russia, Putin, Another Cold War?"

My guest is Ben G. Frank, journalist, travel writer and author of Klara’s Journey, which tells the story of a 17-year-old-girl who must travel alone across Siberia just after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

Ben G. Frank, author, journalist, is considered one of this country’s most distinguished travel writers and commentators on Jewish communities around the world.With the publication of The Scattered Tribe, Traveling the Diaspora from Cuba to India to Tahiti & Beyond, he breaks new ground in reporting on far-flung exotic Jewish outposts. He is the author of A Travel Guide to Jewish Europe 3rd edition, A Travel Guide to Jewish Russia and Ukraine and A Travel Guide to the Jewish Caribbean and South America. (Pelican Publishing Company) Frank, a noted Jewish travel writer, traveled through Russia and the Ukraine, Siberia and the Russian Far East, China and Japan, as well as Canada, before writing this historical novel. The telling of the story, the secrets of the Rasputnis family, the deadly struggles of a young girl to find her father, the characters who seek fulfillment in overcoming jealousy and sibling rivalry, make Klara’s Journey, a read about human destiny.

A former newspaper reporter with the New Haven Register and Elizabeth Daily Journal, he has published articles in Hadassah Magazine, Reform Judaism Magazine, National Jewish Monthly of B’nai B’rith, Jewish Frontier, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Jewish Press, Jewish Exponent, Jewish Week, as well as The New Haven Register, Inside Chappaqua Magazine, and Inside Magazine, Philadelphia, PA.His books have been cited and reviewed in the New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, Huffington Post, Chicago Tribune, Associated Press, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Miami Herald, Palm Beach Post, andLauderdale Sun-Sentinel.Frank has given talks at Jewish Book Fairs, synagogues and temples. His many lectures include, “Tolerance and Identity: Jews in Early New York, 1654–1825,” at the Museum of the City of New York, as well as a talk at the 92nd Street Y. He has appeared on hundreds of radio and TV talk-shows. He is a B.A., cum laude graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and an M.A. graduate of the Center of Israel and Jewish Studies, Columbia University. He has been active in such professional organizations as the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the Overseas Press Club, the American Jewish Public Relations Society and the Pacific Area Travel Association. Frank is president of The Frank Promotion Corp., a public relations firm, specializing in radio-tv talk-shows. He lives with his wife Riva in Palm Beach County, Florida. The couple has two sons, Martin and Monte, and four grandchildren.

Frances Perkins: America’s Greatest Cabinet Official and the Fight for Economic Justice in America! 5-1-13

My guest is Dr. Chris Breiseth, the Chairman of the Board of the Frances Perkins Center, of Damariscotta, Me.

Dr. Christopher N. Breiseth is the immediate past president and CEO of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, which is located at the FDR Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York. He served in that position from 2001 to 2008. He was president of Deep Springs College in California from 1980 to 1983 and of Wilkes University from 1984 to 2001. He earned his B.A. in history at UCLA, a Masters of Literature in Modern British History from Oxford and a Ph.D. in European History from Cornell.

While at Cornell, he lived at the Telluride House, where Frances Perkins was a guest for the last five years of her life. During that period she taught at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Together, Breiseth and Miss Perkins organized two seminars for house members, one with Henry A. Wallace, the other with James Farley. Following Miss Perkins's death in 1965, Breiseth wrote an article, "The Frances Perkins I Knew," which provides some of the material on Frances Perkins's life at Telluride House for Kirstin Downey's book, "The Woman Behind the New Deal." The article is available on line. He also served for a year and a half in 1967 and 1968 as Chief of Policy Guidance for the Community Action Program which was part of the Office of Economic Opportunity, President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. He is the husband of the late Jane Morhouse Breiseth and he has three daughters and two grandchildren.

 

 

“The Rise, Decline and Fall (?) of the Miranda Decision” With Professor Yale Kamisar 2-6-13

My guest is the Distinguished Professor Yale Kamisar, and our subject is the “Miranda Decision, Search and Seizure protection, and its future.”

Yale Kamisar (born August 29, 1929) is the Clarence Darrow Distinguished University Professor of Law Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. A "nationally recognized authority on constitutional law and criminal procedure," Kamisar is known as the "Father of Miranda" for his influential role in the landmark U.S Supreme Court decision in Miranda v. Arizona (1966).

Kamisar graduated from New York University, where he was a member of the Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps. Kamisar commanded an assault platoon in the Korean War from 1951 to 1953, fighting at the famous T-bone Hill. Kamisar graduated from the Columbia Law School in 1954 and was at Covington & Burling before becoming a law professor.  Kamisar taught at the University of Minnesota Law School from 1957 to 1964 and joined the University of Michigan Law School faculty in 1965.

Yale Kamisar is the author of many books. He wrote Police Interrogation and Confessions: Essays in Law and Policy (1980), which is the "leading commentary on the procedures of criminal justice" and was described by Francis A. Allen as "one of the great achievements of legal scholarship since the end of the Second World War

Kamisar also co-wrote Criminal Justice in Our Time. He has extensive written on the U.S. Supreme Court, writing five annual volumes of The Supreme Court: Trends and Developments, as well as the chapters on criminal procedure for The Burger Court: The Counter-Revolution That Wasn't, The Burger Years, and The Warren Court: A Retrospective. Kamisar also is the co-author of all ten editions of the casebook Modern Criminal Procedure: Cases, Comments & Questions (with Wayne R. LaFave, Jerold Israel, and Orin S. Kerr), and all nine editions of the casebook Constitutional Law: Cases, Comments & Questions.  More than 30 Supreme Court opinions have cited Kamisar; "citations to his writings by other federal courts, as well as state courts, number far into the hundreds."

 

“The 2nd Amendment: Is it Out of Date and Should it be Repealed” with Michael Shapiro, 1-9-13

My guest is defense lawyer, legal commentator, and former prosecutor, Michael Shapiro, of Carter, Ledyard, & Milburn. Our show is whether the 2^nd Amendment is outdated, not really relevant and should it be repealed”

The 2^nd Amendment to the US Constitution states: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Mr. Michael Shapiro is a long-time Scarsdale resident and noted criminal defense lawyer. Mr. Shapiro, who was raised in the Bronx, was educated at the City College of New York, where he received a Bachelor of Arts cum laude, and later earned his JD from New York University. He is currently a faculty member of the Cardozo Law School’s Intensive Advocacy Program and has been a frequent guest panelist at the Harvard Law School. He is now a partner with the prestigious Wall Street, New York law firm, Carter, Ledyard & Milburn, which was established in 1854.